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Bolivian miners settle dispute with Colquiri mining company

La
Paz, Sep 30 (EFE).- The groups of Bolivian miners vying for control of
the Andean Colquiri mine reached an agreement that resolves their
conflict by arriving at a division of its richest ore vein, Government
Minister Carlos Romero said Sunday.

The
agreement, which was reached on Saturday night, is "historic" and the
leaders of the miners working for the state and the private cooperatives
acted with "serenity and maturity" and decided to work together to
exploit the disputed deposits of zinc and tin, Romero said.

The
Union Federation of Mineworkers of Bolivia, or FSTMB, whose workers are
employed by the state, dropped its demand for the entire Colquiri mine
to be solely controlled by the government and agreed for a part of its
best vein of metals be exploited by the workers of the Federation of
Mining Cooperatives, or Fencomin.

The
Colquiri mine was expropriated in June by President Evo Morales from
the Swiss firm Glencore and since then it has been the target of a
confrontation between those two mining sectors that worsened over the
past three weeks with a number of violent incidents.

The
first point of the accord establishes the commitment of the groups to
recover "the coexistence in peace and harmony of the entire population
of Colquiri," located 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of La Paz, where
mutual threats of new clashes had been made.

An
FSTMB miner died 12 days ago and several others were injured when
demonstrators from the private cooperatives threw dynamite charges at a
union office in La Paz, but so far who was responsible for the death has
not been definitively clarified.

The
Bolivian Workers Central, or COB, supported with a partial strike
lasting 72 hours the FSTMB miners and had warned that it would call for
an open-ended strike and a march from the altiplano, or high plateau,
region to La Paz if the Morales administration accepted the cooperative
members' demand to give them Colquiri's richest vein to exploit.

The
COB leadership, however, hailed the agreement to put an end to the
conflict and reduce the tension at the mine, which the FSTMB miners were
continuing to occupy as they awaited their leaders' reports on the
signing of the accord.

The cooperative members asked the government to return to the mine on Sunday when the other group fully demobilizes